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My Vintage Brews

I hope everybody is enjoying the holiday season and taking things easy. I know that I am; between the garage fire, getting rear ended, quitting smoking, and getting 65th at Grand Prix Toronto last weekend, I would certainly describe the past week as the exact opposite of 'tis the season to be jolly.'

Yet despite my laundry list of holiday woes and stresses, I am here to bring you a holiday cornucopia of new and interesting Vintage content. In today's article, I am going to share with you some of the different decks I have been working on for Vintage and why I think they might be interesting choices to play in future tournaments.

The first thing I have noticed over the past month is that the Vintage metagame appears to be shifting back to being more creature-centric. In particular, all decks seem to have set their eyes upon beating Mishra's Workshop, which has asserted itself as one of (if not the most) powerful decks in the meta. Bomberman has also continued to prove that it is one of the top decks to beat, as the versatility of being able to switch between combo, control, and creature aggro offers a lot of flexibility from matchup to matchup.

The whole idea of building a few new Vintage decks started a few weeks ago after I had finished writing my yearly letter to Santa Claus:

Dear Santa,

All I want for Christmas is a Vintage deck that beats Workshop on the draw and is decent against blue creature decks. Can you ship me a list?

A deck that beats Workshop on the draw!? What do you think this is, Magical Christmasland!?

Santa

Looking over the letter, I thought I might as well just start brewing a few new decks since no one is going to build decks for me.

The first thing I started working on was a deck that utilized Deathrite Shaman as an extra mana accelerant and utility finisher.

Although I wasn't very high on Deathrite Shaman when it was first printed, having played with the card at the last two Modern Gran Prix I can definitively say that it is absolutely amazing. It really impacts the game in multiple ways aside from just being a mana dork.

It is pretty sweet that he is a conditional Birds of Paradise that doesn't require green to be cast and that he is conditional graveyard hate, life gain, and a win condition all wrapped into a 1CC card!

"He's got the 'Deathrite' stuff."

I actually went on to build two separate Deathrite Shaman decks, both of which have been performing well for me in playtesting (despite not being completely tuned at this point).

Sideboard

The biggest difference between this deck and traditional Grixis lists is obviously the inclusion of four copies of Deathrite Shaman. In practice, I have really liked the Shaman a lot because he improves the number of good starting hands by virtue of being a one-drop and quickly progressing my game plan through mana development.

There are also a few other things that I have noticed about playing with Deathrite Shaman. First, Wasteland and Strip Mine become much better in decks with the Shaman since not only does the Shaman put me ahead on mana, which offsets using a land drop to Wasteland their land, but also because Wasteland puts two lands into graveyards, which equates to two Shaman activations!

I have also noticed that many blue decks simply are not playing Tinker and Yawgmoth's Will. In particular, I feel like Tinker suffers from the problem of everyone being prepared to beat a Blightsteel Colossus. When coupled with a metagame full of Metamorphs, Jaces, Swords, etc. and the fact that every time you draw or Bob the uncastable target it is basically a blank, the unpopularity of Tinker is unsurprising.

I have really liked scaling back my Tinker bots for playable six-drop artifact creatures. It is still good to have Tinker to find half of Key-Vault, but it also turns Tinker into a value play for Duplicant to get out of a jam or Wurmcoil to try to stabilize. Also, Wurmcoil and Duplicant are very castable the fair way and can have a pretty big impact upon games. I am not sure that this is correct in general, but it has seemed that in close games the utility robots have been critical in winning. I've also found that many of the games where I've Tinkered for Blightsteel that I could or would have won anyway without needing it. However, there were also games where I needed to cast a Duplicant from my hand and it did handily win me the game.

Another card that I think is really good right now is Oath of Druids because it is something that if resolved against Workshop can end up simply winning the game.

It is interesting that though we have the most powerful Oathable creatures ever printed—Blightsteel Colossus, Emrakul, and Griselbrand—that it sometimes feels like these monsters are the most beatable. First, they are very difficult to cast from our hand. Secondly, they are easy pretty to removal with spells, Jace, Clones, and Duplicants. One thing that I noticed when I was playing Oath was that I really wanted a monster that would stay put on the board no matter what.

My idea was that almost all of the decks I am trying to beat are already creature decks, which makes my Oaths better, and that if I can stick an Oath and use it I am going to win the game if they can't deal with what I am Oathing up. The thing is that I need my creatures to stick on the table so that my opponent can't race me. How many times have we all Oathed a Griselbrand only to have it Metamorphed and die to it? A LOT.

One card that came to mind was none other than an Oath target I played about a decade ago:

"Summon unkillable."

Angel is basically invincible when it comes into play against any of the key decks in the format. Now, it is true that it doesn't combo of, or win the game when it attacks—that is the tradeoff. We already know we can Oath for a monster that if it survives may win the game, but I wanted to know what would happen when we Oath for a more defensive monster.

I had a long conversation over the phone with a friend where I eventually suggested and argued for Pristine Angel being something I might want to play in Vintage. He seemed skeptical to say the least. "Why would you want a 4/4 instead of a giant monster?"

"So many unkillable Angels."

My thought process is that as long as I can get a monster deployed to take away my opponent's ability to attack me in the combat step that I should eventually gain inevitability if I can continue to activate my Oath of Druids.

I kind of went off the deep end with this new brew, as it attacks the metagame (Workshop and Bomberman) from a firm board control angle.

Sideboard

The Bant Oath deck was designed as a thought experiment that posed the question: "How far can I push a board control deck and have it be viable?" I really like the idea, especially in a field full of creature decks, of being a deck that resolves Oath and uses it to grind my opponent out over the course of several turns rather than Oathing and trying to be a combo deck. I also like the way that having a full complement of control cards, especially Wasteland, should be very good in the Oath of Druids mirror.

Another thing I have been tinkering around with is sideboarding Mishra's Factories in various decks. As it turns out, having access to Factory is one of the better cards against Workshop, so take that for what it's worth.

"Too good not to find room for!"

Obviously, these decks are more or less in the early stages, but they have tested surprisingly well despite the fact that I haven't had a ton of time to tune them.

The key is that as Mishra's Workshop continues to warp the metagame around its very existence, it becomes easier and easier to build new decks. A variety of new strategies begin to improve simply by virtue of being decent against Workshop and the few other things that are good against Workshop.

While these decks may obviously be soft to fast combo decks like Gush and Burning Wish, those decks have not proven to be able to actually beat Workshop and are thus not a significant enough portion of the metagame to worry too much about.

While these decks might not win a Waterbury or NEV tournament any time soon, I believe that they may hold some spark of truth about where the metagame could be headed in the future. I definitely think that Deathrite Shaman is a card worth trying to play with, and I also think that building Oath of Druids as an anti-creature control deck has a lot of value in a metagame full of Trinket Mages and Lodestone Golems.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed my creative musings!

I hope everybody has a fantastic holiday season, and I will be back next week with my Vintage year in review!